The Biomedical Mutual Organization: a new approach to developing new medical treatments

Summary Self-experimentation is an efficient, productive and proven way to generate new treatments for mild and serious disease. But it is limited by materials available to the individual and the amount of testing one person can do. I advocate the formation of Biomedical Mutual Organizations, self-funded groups of individuals that provide mutual support for exploring new ideas in medical treatment. Such groups could achieve three things. Firstly, they could pool analytical services to validate the quality of materials and analytical services used in self-testing and self-medication, including verification of the identity and purity of medicine ingredients sourced from non-traditional sources. Secondly, they could pool resources to conduct group experiments in new treatments, interpret the results, and generate new hypotheses which could in turn be tested. Thirdly they could conduct more formal clinical trials on the group as a whole of new, indeed radical, therapies, in effect becoming a self-funded biotechnology company. While many practical objections remain to all of these, especially the last, and the last option may actually be illegal in some countries, some of the ethical objections that prevent such arrangements outside the context of a Mutual Organizations are overcome by the alignment of interests of those involved.